My “favorite movie of all time”?  An impossible question to answer.  But one film I can—and do—watch repeatedly is “Gilda,” which was the vehicle that defined Rita Hayworth for my father’s generation and therefore had a secondary but profound influence on me.  Beyond that, however, “Gilda” is an extraordinarily beautiful and emotionally compelling film. 

      Unfortunately, the film has suffered from a lack of critical attention because uncoupling the character from the actor has historically been difficult: “Every man I knew went to bed with Gilda, but they woke up with me,” Hayworth famously protested, although this didn’t seem to dissuade a number of men from testing the case.  Hayworth was one of the two ultimate American women—the dark, voluptuous counterpart to the blonde girl-next-door Betty Hutton.  She was so closely associated with what was robust in this country that Hayworth’s likeness was painted on what was, at the time, the world’s most powerful weapon, an atomic test bomb named “Gilda,” which was detonated over Kwaljalein, thus giving the term, “bombshell,” a newly literal meaning.  Hayworth’s image was everywhere, and men like my father adored her, or, at least, they adored Gilda, who, unlike “Casablanca’s” Ilsa, developed an identiy outside her vehicle.    The film is also compelling to me because it had both the sparkle of the happy, dancing RKO films that had mesmerized me as a kid, as well as that dark, subtly evil and desperate element of estrangement that lies at the heart of film noir, the elements that when on screen—on the small screen, certainly—pulled the world in, like a stylish black hole; the worlds I saw there had a tightness and pressure that were somehow uncomfortably familiar to me. 

     Music and dance notwithstanding, “Gilda” forces attention on dialogue and light and shadow, on composition rather than action on the screen.  When I look back on those evenings with Gilda on a twenty-one inch screen, I wonder how I saw what I did, and I think about how that film, among others, charged and then pulled the color out of the disorderly world around me and reconfigured it with sharp angles and rounded art-deco loops and curves, and the strategically placed stripes that organized the pictures on the screen.

     “Gilda” was also part of my family history:  My parents went to see the film when it was first screened at The Radio City Music Hall in March of 1946, six months before I was born.  My father had newly returned from the Pacific theater, and they had been married for not quite three months.  When the reviews came out, Bosley Crowther didn’t like the film much: “Charles Vidor, who directed; Virginia Van Upp, who produced for Columbia, and a trio of writers deserve no credit at all.  They made out of ‘Gilda’ a slow, opaque, unexciting film,” reported Crowther, a few lines down from calling Hayworth’s dancing, “crude.”  But my parents were taken by it, and I am taken by it, too, although I have never seen the film in a theater.  I grew up with repeated references to the overpowering image of Rita Hayworth and her voluminous hair on the screen.  Buenos Aries was compelling, as well: it was still a holding tank for residual German evil, but the city retained a highly romantic air about it; and it was a perfect place for Hayworth to be Gilda.  Columbia made the film in Hollywood, of course, but spliced in travel footage for atmosphere and verisimilitude.    

      Crowther had it almost all wrong:  He missed the purpose of the movie.  Although “Gilda” is not a great film and lacks the artistry—on all fronts—of “Casablanca,” as well as the gravitas derived from international intrigue and self-sacrificing love in the service of the Free World, it shares a lot with that work and provides a mirror image of the Warner Brothers’ film by re-presenting the dark underbelly of heavy cash-flow ex-patriot life at that time.  Both films take place in war-created communities outside of what we used to call first-world nations.  In Curtiz’s film, "Casablanca" holds hopeful purpose for political agents and escaping refugees while the war is still raging.  In Vidor’s, “Gilda”, Buenos Aires is a city peopled by those who are left over, scrambling for themselves: “A worm’s eye view is the only true one,” a peripheral character reminds us.   

      Both films take place almost exclusively in casinos filled with ventless white dinner jackets, reminders of the crapshoot unpredictability of The World Out There. Rick Blaine is a toughened and cynical American with a heart of gold; but Johnny Farrell is simply cynical.  Victor Laszlo is trying to save a nation; Ballin Mundson is an egoistic, controlling German trying to maintain his hold on a tungsten cartel.  Ilsa Lund’s attempts to balance passion with patriotism drive the film forward; Gilda is out for herself: passion and a brutal will move her through the film, which never reaches a believable, let alone uplifting resolution.  She believes her life amounts to considerably more than a hill of beans.  

      Finally, Rick and Captain Renault walk off into the Moroccan mist, hopefully at the beginning of a beautiful friendship; Johnny and Gilda walk shoulder-to-shoulder out of Mundson’s nightclub with little to offer the viewer in the way of a possibly good future, since the only one that matters in the film is bound by self-protection and acquisition.  The music swells, as it does in Casablanca, but not with La Marseilles.  Instead, we heard non-descript, coercive overworking of the string section.  So Crowther does have something to complain about.  But he misjudged our response to what he mis-quotes a minor but significant character referring to as, “the most curious love-hate pattern I’ve ever had the privilege of witnessing.”    

      I don’t know what’s “curious” about the passionate hate and the extreme measures to which it drives all the characters in Gilda: the script is riddled with references to its transformative power, its drive to ownership, its potential to destroy.  Even as a teenager, I was beginning to understand how this works.  Hate makes you smart, for a while, clever in feeding obsessions; it can provide a near joy from temporarily giving up or giving in; it keeps you focused.  When you can’t trust anyone, hating is easier than loving and certainly more exciting than indifference.  And it’s all about you.
    “If you’re worried about Johnny Farrell,” Gilda says to Mundson, “don’t be.  I hate him.”
    “And he hates you.  That’s very apparent.  But hate can be a very exciting emotion,” he replies, “Very exciting.  Haven’t you noticed that?  Hate is the only thing that ever warmed me.”   

      Everyone, even tungsten cartel swindlers, wants to be warmed.  The impossibility of living without passion makes hate preferable to none at all; and in this film, even desire is flamed by hateful obsession for another over whom one can never quite ensure complete power and control.  Ownership and loyalty— unreasonable, forced, or feigned, or fabricated—to people, not nations, missions, or ideas, is a theme that runs alongside the passionate hate that drives Gilda and Johnny nearly back into each other’s beds.  It is only Johnny Farrell’s vengefulness that keeps them out.
    “You do hate me, don’t you, Johnny?”  Gilda asks, with as much hope as teasing irony.
    “I don’t think you have any idea of how much,” he replies immediately before they lose themselves to their passion.   

      We want to believe there is something more; but there isn’t.  There is hate, there is passion, there is no trust, nor should there be: he left her, unannounced; she married for money without so much as a second warning.  They wandered off and unexpectedly found each other again, gamblers of one sort or another, in Buenos Aires.  Past and future figure minimally in this film, and all problems are addressed with immediacy; no happy Paris flashbacks, no deliberations about what would be best for Czechoslovakia.     And one gets the feeling that there is no reason that either of them would stick around for long, swells of studio strings at the end, notwithstanding.    

      Here lies a major fault with the film: there is no happy ending, not even a resolution, because there can’t be, in spite of what we want to believe and what Vidor wants us to accept.  It was too late for happy endings seventeen minutes and twenty-six seconds into the film, as Ford’s pupils subtly widen and his earlobes minimally drop when his character learns that, in his absence, Gilda found somebody else more reliable on the wardrobe and investment jewelry front and then married him; Gilda responds by offering Johnny a cinema cigarette, a reminder of what the relationship had originally been all about and was going to be again—smoking in “Gilda” works as it does in almost all films, as an index of sexual frustration or immanent fulfillment.  “You smoke too much. I noticed only frustrated people smoke too much, and only the lonely people are frustrated,” says Uncle Pio just before Gilda deliberately induces a jealous rage in Johnny.        

      For years, the luxuriousness of the film, the beauty of individual scenes and long takes, the clothes (some of which Jean Louis cleverly designed to disguise Hayworth’s pregnancy), and the music, stood in the way of my understanding entirely what this movie is tackling.  One reason, of course, is that I had to live a while before I learned to hate really well; and then, I had to live a little longer before I could think usefully about it.  I didn’t have the opportunity to see the “Gilda” very often—“Casablanca,” with its high-minded theme and loyal following turned up more regularly; but Ingrid Bergman, a better actor in a better script with a better leading man, was no Rita Hayworth.  Bergman, even with that full-screen, sincere face does not arrest attention the way Gilda does.  And as beautiful as her gowns are, they drape as though they coalesced from the Allied atmosphere and clung to her out of respect. Gilda worked and bargained for her sequins and exhibits no sincerity save sincere fear, now and again: her full-screen face has always just recently flipped her billowing hair out of the way and is mockingly taking everything she can from us.   

      Even knowing the beginning from the end, I let Gilda do that, and I offer everything up.